A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

Total Pageviews

Archive of Wolff Materials

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

I have been inundated with questions about whether I shall do a series of videotaped lectures on Marx this Fall [well, two people asked.] The short answer is no. I am thinking of doing a series of six two hour videotaped lectures on Marx on the Columbia campus in the Spring 2018 semester, but that is still up in the air. Tomorrow I shall make my first trip to Morningside Heights [which is where Columbia is] for some exploratory talks. We shall see how that all develops.

There is an old story about a dirt poor Jewish peasant – let
us call him Moishe – who lives in a tiny one room hovel with his wife, his mother-in-law,
his two children, and a dog. His sole
possession is a pig, which roots about in the yard. Moishe is beside himself at the crowding of
his little home, so he goes to seek guidance from the rabbi. The rabbi listens to Moishe’s tale of woe and
then asks. “Moishe, don’t you have a pig?”
“Yes,” says Moishe, “he lives in the yard.” “Fine,” says the rabbi, “bring the pig into
your home.” “But rabbi,” Moishe begins
to protest. ‘Moishe,” the rabbi says
sternly, “bring the pig into your home.”
Moishe goes home, shaking his head, but the rabbi is the wisest person
in the village, so he does as the rabbi says.
Well, now things are completely unbearable. With his wife, his mother-in-law, his two
children, and the dog, he could barely turn around in his home, and now the pig
is rooting everywhere in the tiny room, getting under foot. Moishe goes back to the rabbi and says, plaintively,
“Rabbi, I did what you said, and now my life is even more miserable, if that
could be imagined. The pig is sleeping
in my bed! What should I do?” The rabbi
strokes his beard and replies, “Put the pig in the yard.” The next Sabbath, after services, Moishe
grasps the rabbi’s hand, tears in his eyes, and says, “Rabbi, I cannot thank you
enough! Life is wonderful now that the
pig is in the yard.”

For the past three months, I have been dealing with
increasing pain in both hands and wrists.
The medical consensus is that I have osteoarthritis, not exactly unknown
in someone my age. I have had a series
of tests [next week something called an EMG test, in which they put needles in
me and measure electric conduction or some such thing, sort of like acupuncture
without the incense]. The problem with
my hands is not exactly life-threatening, but it does hurt a good deal, and
would have a serious impact on my golf game, if I played golf. Then, last week, during my morning walk, as I
was looking up at a hawk perched on a power stanchion, I tripped and took a
really hard fall on the pavement. My
main injury was a blow to the inside of my left knee, which swelled way
up. As the swelling began to go down, a
big bruise appeared and it began to hurt really, really badly. When I got up in the morning, it hurt so much
I could hardly walk. I went to the UNC
same day clinic, and a young resident, after looking at it and consulting with
his supervisor, gave me the official medical judgment: I had fallen and bruised the inside of my
knee. In time it would get better. I was, of course, grateful for this high-powered
medical judgment, and went home to take some more Tylenol. This morning, for the very first time, it
seemed that the pain was less severe, and I felt a great sense of relief. This put me in a much better mood, even
though the pains in my hands had not in any way diminished. And so I thought of the story with which I
began this post.

Then it occurred to me:
For at least sixty of my eighty-three years, I have been complaining
about everything that I find appalling about the country in which I live: the brutal treatment of African-Americans,
the discrimination against women, the exploitation of workers, the destructive
imperial adventures of the government.
Now, in what was supposed to be my golden years, I must deal with a despicable
fascistic narcissist in the White House and the daily abominations he visits on
the world. I daydream endlessly about
what a relief it would be were to resign, or be impeached, or die. How nice it would be to see him removed from
office, so that we could go back to the way things were before he won the
presidency. What a relief to put that
pig back out in the yard.

Monday, August 28, 2017

At the conclusion of a long and very interesting two-part
comment Austin Haigler asks: “does
anyone try to think about how best to communicate and engage the people that
they least agree with and MORE SO don't even share the same conceptualization
of objects and their meanings with? I know we all can have a tendency to write
off conservatives, evangelicals, Trump supporters as uncanny, stupid,
backwards, immoral, regressive, etc, but being from the southern rural areas I
am from, I see and know the good mixed up with all the bad in these peoples' lives
and ideologies. There has to be a way to reach them and it be effective in SOME
way.”

This question cries out for an answer, and I am going to
make an effort to begin thinking one through in this post. I invite my readers, especially those who do
not usually comment, to chime in.
Although Haigler poses the question in a very simple, direct way, we
must not make the mistake of imagining that there is a simple answer, a turn of
phrase that will do the trick. Of one
thig I am certain: a jargon-laden
response full of “interpellation” and “dialectical” and “ideological” and “(re)volution”
is worse than useless.

Let me begin with an observation. Most people have a pretty good grasp of the
world they encounter in their daily lives.
They know how to get to the grocery store, who the good guys and the bad
guys are at work, who in the neighborhood is living high on the hog and who is
just scraping by. They are not stupid
and they are not ignorant. They may have
quite bizarre beliefs about things they do not see or hear or smell or
touch. They may think that the universe
was created by a sentient, caring God. They
may think human beings once walked with dinosaurs. They may believe they live in a land of the
free and home of the brave. They may
even imagine that they are paid a wage equal to the marginal product of their
labor, a belief far more fanciful than any of the others I have just mentioned. But be that as it may, they are nevertheless
able to go to the grocery store without getting lost.

If you try to argue with someone who believes that Barack
Obama was born in Kenya and spirited into America as a Manchurian Candidate,
you will probably have very little success and will certainly find the
experience intensely frustrating. But if
you disagree with him or her about how to get to the grocery store – you saying
you turn left off Main onto Elm and she saying you turn right off Main onto
Broad – the two of you will probably figure out quite quickly a way to settle
the dispute, and once settled, my guess is that the loser in that dispute will
not persist in maintaining the truth of his or her directions.

Some disputes are disagreements about the way the world is,
and some are conflicts between people with opposed interests. To take an old example that lies at the heart
of The Wizard of Oz, if a nineteenth
century mid-western farmer and an eastern banker are arguing over the desirability
of the Gold Standard, the farmer, who carries a big mortgage on his farm, will
argue for going off the Gold Standard, which will increase the rate of
inflation and progressively lighten the burden of his monthly payments in real
dollars, while the banker will argue for remaining on the Gold Standard, which
will keep inflation down and maintain the value, in real dollars, of the
mortgage payments he, as the lender, receives.
This is a genuine conflict of interest, not a confusion on someone’s
part over the nature of social reality.

What conclusion do I draw from this archaic example? Well, perhaps it is best to begin a
discussion with a Trump supporter by doing two things: First, find out what she cares about in her
immediate daily life, and tell her what you care about in your daily immediate
life; Second, ask her whether she believes that Trump will make it easier for her
to get what she wants, and if she says yes, find out why she thinks that. Then tell her what you care about in your
immediate life, and explain why you think Trump will make it harder for you to
get what you want.

Now, it may well be that at that point, you will both see
that what you have is not a disagreement about the way the world is but a
conflict of interests. But it is at
least possible that you will be able to show her ways in which Trump is going
to make it harder for her to get what she wants. [I hesitate to suggest that she might be able
to show you that Trump is going to make it easier to get what you want. I mean, let’s be serious.]

This will clearly be the beginning of a very long
discussion. But it is probably going to
be more successful than simply pointing out to her that she is a despicable
racist fascist.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

One of the incidental benefits of having really smart children is that they are a go-to source of wisdom on many subjects. There has been a good deal of talk about the
possibility that Trump would seek to frustrate the Mueller investigation by
pardoning everyone in sight as soon as Mueller got close. TV commentators oponed that should Trump do
this, the recipients of the pardons would then have forfeited their 5th
Amendment rights and could be compelled to testify before Congressional committees. This led me to ask the following question of
my son, Tobias Barrington Wolff, who is, among other things, one of the leading
experts of his generation in the legal field of Civil Procedure:

“Suppose Trump pardons, say, Manafort, for whatever, and
Congress compels his testimony, denying him the privilege of taking the 5th
because he has been pardoned. Suppose Manafort refuses to answer and is
charged with Contempt of Congress. Does Trump have the power to pardon
him for that as well?” Back came the
following reply:

“Yes, that lies within the powers of the presidency, but
with some caveats. First (and stating the obvious) that would presumably put rocket
fuel under the calls for impeachment. The Supreme Court has held explicitly
that the pardon power extends to criminal contempt proceedings in federal
court. The same ruling would apply to contempt of Congress. In that ruling (Ex
Parte Grossman, from 1925), the Court also indicated that an abusive use of the
pardon power in such cases, if such a thing were to happen, would be remediable
through impeachment:

"If it be said that the President by successive pardons
of constantly recurring contempts in particular litigation might deprive a
court of power to enforce its orders in a recalcitrant neighborhood, it is
enough to observe that such a course is so improbable as to furnish but little
basis for argument. Exceptional cases like this if to be imagined at all would
suggest a resort to impeachment rather than to a narrow and strained
construction of the general powers of the President."

It is entirely possible that the unstable madman in the Oval
Office has told Manafort that he should stick by him no matter what and he will
engage in extravagant uses of the pardon power, but I think it would result in
his removal by impeachment very quickly. In addition, the pardon power can only
nullify criminal liability. In that same ruling of Ex Parte Grossman, the Court
made clear that the pardon power has no impact on civil contempt proceedings.
This is a distinction that is not widely understood. When a person refuses to testify and
gets put in jail until he is willing to comply with the court's order (like in
the high-profile cases involving reporters), that is a civil contempt
proceeding, not criminal contempt, even though jail is involved. I address this
issue in my casebook, as it happens. Here is the section where I lay out the
basics of the doctrine:

Contempt sanctions can be either "civil" or
"criminal" in nature, though this terminology can be somewhat
counterintuitive. The distinction between civil and criminal contempt does not
arise from the nature of the underlying proceeding — a civil lawsuit can give
rise to either civil or criminal contempt. Nor does it depend primarily on the
nature of the actions undertaken by the individual who violates the injunction,
nor even on the use of imprisonment as a sanction, which courts can employ in a
limited fashion in a civil as well as a criminal contempt proceeding. Rather,
the distinction between "civil" and "criminal" contempt
refers to the goal that the court seeks to accomplish by imposing the sanction.

Civil contempt sanctions are remedial in nature and aim to secure compliance with
the court's order. When a court imposes fines in a civil contempt proceeding,
it does so in order to compensate the injured party for the harm it has
suffered as a result of the violator's actions, which may include attorneys'
fees and other costs associated with enforcing the order. Courts may also
impose a prospective schedule of fines to secure compliance and deter future
violations, providing, for example, that a party will be fined some substantial
sum of money for every day that it violates the injunction going forward.
Courts can even imprison a party who refuses to abide by a court's order. One
controversial example of this form of civil contempt can occur when a reporter
refuses to comply with a discovery order or subpoena requiring her to reveal
her journalistic sources or otherwise disclose information she has promised to
keep confidential. Jail time is a proper part of a civil contempt sanction only
when it aims to secure compliance with the court's order. Thus, a reporter who
is jailed in a civil contempt proceeding retains the ability to release herself
at any time by complying with the order of the court, and her imprisonment
cannot last longer than the underlying proceeding in any event, since the
remedial purpose of her imprisonment ceases once the order or injunction is no
longer active.
Criminal contempt sanctions, in contrast, aim to punish parties for flouting
the authority of the court. The basic tools of enforcement available to the
court in a criminal contempt proceeding — fine and imprisonment — are the same
as they would be in a civil proceeding, but the sanctions that the court
imposes in a criminal proceeding are not limited to strictly remedial purposes.
Thus, a court can impose a period of incarceration in criminal contempt proceedings
that will last well beyond the termination of the underlying action, and the
target of the criminal sanction cannot win her release by agreeing to comply
with the court's order in the future. Similarly, when a court imposes a fine as
a criminal contempt sanction, the defendant pays the fine to the court as
punishment for his actions, rather than to his adversary as compensation.

So, even if he is willing to abuse the powers of his office
without restraint, there are some limitations on his ability to subvert the rule
of law prospectively — providing that Congress is prepared to enforce those
limits. And Manafort, who has real lawyers (unlike the grifter), is probably
aware of those limitations.

Having taken note recently on this blog of a thirtieth
wedding anniversary and a sixty-ninth first date anniversary, it occurred to me
that I ought also to observe another anniversary, this one of my service in
the U. S. military. At this time sixty years
ago, I was approaching the end of my eight week stint in Basic Training at Fort
Dix, New Jersey. I have devoted an
entire chapter of my Autobiography to the experience, so I shall not re-tell my
stories of that six month hiatus in my career.
I am virtually the only philosopher I know of my generation or younger
to have served in the military, but many of those half a generation older saw
real and very dangerous service during World War II.

I can still recall sitting at a table at an annual meeting
of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, having a cup
of coffee and listening wide-eyed to Sylvain Bromberger and Jack Rawls swap war
stories. Sylvain, born in Belgium,
actually fought in the famous Battle of the Bulge in the winter of ’44-’45, and
Jack served in the South Pacific.
Sylvain and I were graduate students together at Harvard and then
colleagues for two years at Chicago. He
taught for many years at MIT, where he is now Professor Emeritus. When my first wife and I drove to Cambridge from
Chicago so that I could do a visiting year at Wellesley, he helped us load the
UHaul van. Sylvain is one of my favorite
people in the world, and I was delighted to visit with him briefly during my
talk at MIT a year or so ago.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Thirteen months ago, five-time student deferred Donald J. Trump said of John McCain, "I prefer people who don't get captured." It was a gratuitous, ugly, cheap remark that earned Trump universal condemnation, but of course did not cost him either the nomination or the election. A few words of background. John McCain was a young ne'er do well much pampered, the son of a famous admiral when he entered the Navy Air Corps. He crashed four or five planes before earning his wings, and was then shot down over enemy territory and captured during the Viet Nam War being held a prisoner for five years. In the prison camp, he was tortured, as were the other men held there. When the Viet Namese discovered the identity of McCain's father, they offered to release him as a propaganda move, and McCain refused unless all of the other men were released as well! You can say anything you wish about the legitimacy of the war, the morality of serving in it, or McCain's long and appalling political career, but that was an act of extraordinary heroism, and he deserves all of the praise he has had from it since. Has he dined out off it, as we say? Used it for political advantage? Of course. But I don't care. That was an act of great and totally admirable heroism and self-sacrifice. So Trump trashed him for it. And McCain, who was in the midst of a difficult re-election campaign, bided his time. Did McCain forget that insult? Hardly. Did time heal the wound? Not a bit. McCain waited until the moment when Trump's fondest dream depended on McCain's single vote, and then, in the most dramatic fashion possible, he shafted Trump.Now Trump has pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the first voice to condemn the pardon is that of John McCain. I will offer a prediction. Every time McCain finds himself in a position dramatically, publicly shaft to Trump -- which, in light of the balance of votes in the Senate may be rather often -- he will do so. Trump will fume, rage, storm, tweet, and McCain will just keep shafting him.Pass the popcorn.

Having managed to complete the NY TIMES crossword puzzle this morning, I idled some time away
watching the third lecture on Ideological Critique that I recorded some time
ago and put up on YouTube. In that
lecture, as a wrap-up to my exposition of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, I went through his account of the
ideology of time-consciousness, which I think is the most
brilliant bit of ideological analysis I have ever read. Then, in the lecture, I offer my own
analysis of the ideology of space-consciousness, a natural extension of Mannheim's theory
for a Kant scholar like me. Needless to
say, my bit of analysis cannot hold a candle to Mannheim’s but it isn’t bad,
and I watched myself with that innocent narcissistic pleasure that an infant
gets from contemplating his own feces.

I had totally forgotten the conclusion of the lecture,
however. Without warning, I cut at the
very end of the lecture to a clip of the immortal Pete Seeger singing that old
union song, “Which Side Are You On?” I
have to tell you, it brought tears to my eyes.
Those were better days, when I was young, despite the evils of segregation,
the oppression of women, and the criminalization of gay Americans.

Friday, August 25, 2017

Today, Susie and I celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary. In November, I will take note of the anniversary of our first date in 1948, about which I wrote on this blog on August 24, 2015. On October 6th, I shall fly up to New York to deliver a lecture at Columbia's Heyman Center, my maiden performance as a new member of Columbia's Society of Senior Scholars. The date with Susie was an outing to the Thalia Movie House on the Upper West Side, where we saw a revival of the pre-war Marcel Pagnol film, Cesar. GoogleMaps tells me that the Thalia still exists, now enlarged and rechristened as SymphonySpace. If there is time, maybe I will walk down to 95th street and take a look at the site of that fateful date sixty-nine years ago. Maybe there is something to the theory of Eternal Return.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

With startling speed, public commentary about Trump has
moved to open expressions of doubt about his mental stability and the threat
that this poses to the safety of the world.
A number of cable news commentators have expressed the hope that the
generals with whom Trump has surrounded himself – Kelly, Mattis, McMaster –
will dissuade him from launching a nuclear attack on North Korea in a fit of
pique. This speculation was given new
currency by the dire warnings of James Clapper, an Army Lieutenant General who
is recently retired from a seven year stint as Director of National
Intelligence. I think it is important to
understand why this speculation is misguided, and why General Clapper is so
worried. The readers of this blog may
all understand these matters, but since this is quite literally the most
important subject in the world just now, a little repetition will not hurt.

During the Cold War, American military planners believed the
nation to be in perpetual danger of a preemptive nuclear attack by the Soviet
Union [whether this was true is irrelevant for what I am saying, as will become
clear.] The received scientific wisdom
was that there was no defense against such an attack, once launched. Hence it was essential to deter the Soviet
Union from attacking by so arranging America’s nuclear arsenal that it could
respond with absolute certainty and reliability to an attack, regardless of the
extent of the damage. Despite the
existence of a fleet of American nuclear submarines perpetually on patrol in
the world’s oceans, armed with half-megaton missiles capable of being fired
with sufficient accuracy to obliterate a Russian city, there were
considerations that seemed to American planners to necessitate circumventing
the ordinary military chain of command.

Under normal non-nuclear circumstances, when the order to
launch an attack of some sort is given by the President in his or her role as
Commander in Chief, the order goes to the Secretary of Defense, who conveys it
to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in turn conveys it to the
Chief of Staff of the appropriate service [Army, Navy, or Air Force], who sends
it down to the commander overseeing the unit tasked with the attack, who then
communicates the order to the field commander of the men and women actually selected
to carry out the attack. This is the chain of command, and everything in the
military rests on it.

But military planners believed that it might prove
impossible to rely on this chain of command in the event of a nuclear
attack. They recognized that if the Russian
attack came by way of intercontinental ballistic missiles, there would be at
most eight or ten minutes between the time when the missile launches were detected
by radar and the time when the missiles struck the United States. This posed a series of problems:

First, the President might be killed, leaving a constitutional
vacuum with no settled way to determine who now had the authority to order a counterattack
with such weapons as survived the first strike.
Second, key individuals in the chain of command might be killed,
disrupting the orderly transmission of a Presidential order. Third, communications might be interrupted
physically or electronically, making it impossible for a lawful launch order
actually to reach the missile silo personnel or the Captain of a nuclear
submarine. Fourth, even if a lawful
order did reach the military personnel actually in a position to fire the
nuclear weapons, it might be impossible for those men and women to double check
the order by communicating back to headquarters before carrying out the order.

For all these reasons [and some others besides,] the
deliberate decision was made entirely to circumvent the normal chain of command
and place at the hand of the President the ability unilaterally to order a
nuclear strike immediately and without the chance for second thoughts or
countermanding or even slow walking down the chain. Hence the oft mentioned “nuclear football”
containing the launch codes, carried by a uniformed officer who accompanies the
President everywhere. Hence also the
training and clear orders to missile silo personnel or nuclear submarine
Captains designed to guarantee that once the launch order is received with the
proper codes, it will be immediately carried out.

Now, if General Kelly or General McMaster or General Mattis happens
to be in the room when Trump decides to launch a nuclear attack, the general
can try to dissuade Trump. He can even
go against a lifetime of training and experience and physically try to wrestle
Trump to the ground and stop him from giving the order. But should Trump be alone when he gets it
into his head to start a nuclear war, there is nothing between him and the men
and women who will actually launch the attack.

General Clapper knows all of this, of course. That is why he is worried.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

As I have observed before in this space, the Viet Nam War
nearly destroyed the U. S. military, forcing the generals to end the draft and
move to an all volunteer army. With the
threat of conscription removed, the general populace ceased to care very much
about foreign military entanglements.
The cloying practice grew up of saying “Thank you for your service” to
anyone in uniform. It thus became
politically possible to commit American troops abroad in an endless series of “wars,”
the term now used for projections of power around the globe. Neither Obama then nor Trump now was compelled
to explain to “our brave men and women in uniform” exactly why they are being
sent in harm’s way, inasmuch as they are all volunteers. The fact that the United States created and armed the Taliban to fight against the Russians is neither here nor there. That is the way an imperial power is supposed
to operate.

Sandwiched in between comments on the eclipse and
May-December romances were as number of interesting comments on my socialist
musings, to which I should like to respond.
First of all, my apologies to Jerry Brown. Of course social savings means the
allocation of a portion of the annual product to investment. I was not suggesting that society should
build fallout shelters stocked with forty years of groceries. I am afraid I was just assuming everyone
would understand that. And yes, Howie
Berman, there is money, there are art museums [assuming people want them],
there will, I should imagine, be small businesses, and perhaps some big ones as
well. Stock markets? Interesting question. In a huge, complex economy like that of the
United States, there have to be institutional mechanisms for allocating
investment capital. Capital? Of course.
Without capital, we will all be ranging across the foraging for nuts and
berries.

Let me begin by recalling the central point of my essay, “The
Future of Socialism.” [There really is
no convenient way to talk about an extremely complex subject without assuming
an acquaintance with what one has written previously. This is not a subject for sound bites.] I built that essay around Marx’s brilliant
insight that new economic formations develop “in the womb of the old.” I argued that central planning and the
substitution of quasi-political decision making for simple response to the
workings of the market was happening right now exactly where Marx would have
predicted, not in government departments or on collective farms but in the
executive offices of great corporations.
This transformation, a necessary precursor to socialism, is, I argued,
not a consequence of the brainwashing of corporate executives by their rad-lib
Ivy League professors. It is a transformation
demanded by institutional developments within corporations as they internalize
decisions that can no longer be made merely by heeding market signals.

The evolution of capitalism into an economic system suitable
for socialism is happening right now.
True socialism cannot be imposed on a capitalist system unprepared for
it, any more than mature capitalist production could have been introduced into
medieval France by an inspired king.
Whether socialism will replace capitalism is, alas, not inevitable, or
even likely, for reasons I outlined in the essay I have several times
referenced. But it is possible.

A second point, derived from my reading of Thomas Piketty’s
important book, Capital in the
Twenty-first Century, about which I wrote and posted a 9,000 word review
three years ago. For reasons that
Piketty undertakes to explain, hereditary – or, as he calls it, patrimonial –
capitalism has historically been the norm and is reemerging now, after an
uncharacteristic retreat in the generation and a half after the two world wars
and intervening depression of the twentieth century. When I ask myself: What single dramatic step would, more than
anything else, move America towards socialism?, the answer that comes back is: Impose a 100% inheritance and gift tax on all
estates greater than fifty times the median annual income of American households
[roughly 2.5 million dollars]. The
wealth thus taxed would become the property of the state. Over not too much time, vast swaths of
accumulated capital would be collectively owned and managed.

A response to F. Lengyal’s comment about wage incentives [I
apologize for picking and choosing which comments to respond to – there were
many worthy of extended replies.] Let me
talk personally about this subject of incentives to work. [Never mind so-called Game Theory analyses,
all of which strike me as simply useless.]
Leaving aside university teaching, which, as Kant says about something
else in the Preface to the First Edition of the First Critique, is “rather an amusement than a labour,” I have had
a total of four real jobs in my life.
The first, as a sixteen year old high school graduate, was as a waiter
in a posh summer camp. The second, as an
eighteen year old after my sophomore year at Harvard, was as a Copy Boy on the
old Herald Tribune. The third, as a
nineteen year old college graduate, was as a counselor at a benighted summer
camp in Vermont. And the fourth was my
six months in the U. S. Army. I have
never worked in a factory, or in a business office, or in a hospital. I have never driven a semi, or harvested grapes,
or ridden a garbage truck. So my
personal knowledge of the work world is confined to observation. Here is what I have observed.

Most people work very hard [leaving to one side professors],
especially people who earn low wages.
Raising workers’ wages does not lead them to shirk their work, or goof
off, or “choose leisure over income.” For nine years, before moving to a retirement
home, my wife and I hired a firm called Molly Maids to clean our apartment every
two weeks. Two women spent the better part
of two hours on this job, for which we paid Molly Maids $108. I asked one of the women how much she made,
and she said just under ten dollars an hour.
Since I believe that $15 an hour ought to be the minimum wage, I took to
paying each of them ten dollars extra, to bring them up to that minimum. This was not a tip, it was a wage
supplement. After I started this
practice, there was not the slightest change in the character of their work. If their employer had raised their wages to
fifteen dollars an hour, I am absolutely certain they would have done an
identical job in every house or apartment they cleaned. They simply would have made fifty percent
more money.

Let me give another counterexample. Pay in the U. S. military is rigidly
determined by rank and years of service in rank [leaving aside housing
allowances and some other things of that nature.] The top pay, for a four-star general with
lots of years in grade, is $186,998.40 a year [assuming that I am reading
correctly the chart I found on line.] To
reach this rank requires not only a good deal of work but also, almost
certainly, service in a war zone, probably a number of war zones, where one can
quite easily be blown up or maimed for life.
That is not quite as much as a second year Associate, two years out of
law school, makes at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, a big time law firm. And yet, the U. S. Army is one of the best
run, best managed huge conglomerates in the world. Lord knows, it is better run that Sears,
Roebuck, where my first father-in-law served as Vice President of Public
Relations for a while.

The talk about incentives, tricked out with pseudo-math or
Game Theory gobbledygook, is a transparent ideological rationalization for
keeping the wages of workers low so that profits can swell. I have a great many uncertainties about
socialism, but workers goofing off is not one of them.

Monday, August 21, 2017

Inasmuch as I have absolutely nothing at all to say on the
matter of Roman Polanski, which seems to be of the very greatest concern to the
readers of this blog, I thought I would spend some time, while awaiting the
eclipse, musing about what a democratic socialist society might look like. This is not exactly a matter of pressing
concern, needless to say, but it interests me, so I shall spend a few moments
on it. If anyone wants to follow me down
this rabbit hole into Wonderland, I would suggest taking the time to read my
essay, “The Future of Socialism,” archived at box.net.

I do not have settled views on this matter. Neither did Marx, of course. He was dismissive and scornful of the various
utopian socialist fantasies floated by his contemporaries, believing, as I
understand him, that just as capitalism could not have been foreseen in its
details by even the most prescient thinker of the feudal era, so we who are
thoroughly entangled in capitalist society can only speculate on what socialism
would be, grounding our speculations in a rigorous analysis of the reality of capitalism. Consider these remarks therefore in the
nature of an old man’s schwärmerai. [Oh, by the bye, even a true democratic
socialist state would not be de jure
legitimate, as I defined that term in In
Defense of Anarchism. Socialism
cannot overcome the contradiction between the autonomy of the individual and
the authority claims of the state. But
that is a subject for another day.]

First, some definitions.
By “socialism” I mean an advanced industrial or post-industrial economy
and society in which there is collective ownership, management, and control of
the principal means of production.
Understood in that way, there are now no socialist societies nor have
there ever been any. By socialism, I do
not mean a capitalist economy with a strong safety net and a low Gini
coefficient. Nor do I mean a community
of poets and novelists doing a little kitchen garden farming and animal
husbandry, nor even a big kibbutz, or
a society of kibbutzim.

By a democratic socialist society, I mean a society in which
the fundamental decisions about the rate of savings [and consequent economic
growth rate], the structure of wages and salaries, and large scale capital
goods projects rest with the people as a whole and, in some manner, with their
elected representatives. I am not
talking about worker control of individual factories or offices, or local
agricultural, industrial, and service collectives, admirable as those
undoubtedly are.

I am assuming that inherited wealth [not the family
homestead] is prohibited, and I am agnostic about whether an individual, within
his or her lifetime, will be permitted to accumulate considerable wealth. [If I may make a parenthetical nod to a well-known
book by my old friend now sadly departed, Robert Nozick, if sports fans want to
shower great wealth on LeBron James, I don’t care, so long as he doesn’t get to
invest it in shares of Amazon.com or leave it to his kids.]

The single most important collective decision that a
democratic socialist nation would make is the social rate of savings: the proportion of the social product to be
reinvested in economic growth, as opposed to being consumed unproductively by
the members of society for their pleasure, amusement, or edification. [I have at times been quite critical of the
work of John Rawls, so I ought here to note that he seems to be the only major
political theorist, other than Marx himself, who has understood the importance
of this social decision.] In a
capitalist economy, the social rate of savings is not the object of anyone’s decision,
but rather is the consequence of the decisions of countless capitalists or corporate
managers, indirectly influenced nowadays by governmental decisions about tax
rates or interest levels. In some modern
states, most notably China, which seems to have in effect a state capitalist
economy, a very large social rate of savings has been deliberately chosen,
sacrificing the consumption of the present to the comfort of the future. In a state with an expanding or aging
population [or both], an appropriate social rate of savings is essential simply
to maintain current consumption levels.
Note, by the way, that this is entirely separate from the need to set
aside some portion of current production for depreciation of the capital stock.

The second important collective decision is wage rates,
assuming [as I do] that a considerable share of individual consumption will be
paid for out of pocket rather than, as in the case of health care and
education, by social spending. It goes
without saying that the income pyramid should be very much flatter than at
present, even in those European nations with a well-funded social safety
net. Would the present situation
prevail, in which, to put it in shorthand slang terms, suits make significantly
more than shirts? The universal
justification among sociologists and economists for this state of affairs is
that higher wages are required to attract into socially important jobs those
with the special talents or education for them, but I am deeply skeptical of
this familiar rationale. The unstated
assumption is that we would all rather be day laborers or garbage collectors,
but could be wooed away from those jobs into the offices of doctors, lawyers,
or professors by sufficiently lavish salaries.
Absent those salaries, it is presumed, not many would choose actually to
teach classes or see patients or, for that matter, manage factories rather than
working on the assembly line or cleaning toilets. Maybe so, but I doubt it.

Perhaps the most important question is this: with the really important decisions being
decided in the public square rather than out of sight in boardrooms and
corporate getaways, how would we keep those elected to public office on the
straight and narrow, so that they do not use their power, as corporate managers
now do, to rob us all blind? I am
absolutely convinced that some of them will try. I have no expectation that socialism will
somehow turn ordinary human beings into paragons of Socialist Man or Woman. [I have lived through the liberation of South
Africa, the glory days of Mandela, and the decline and corruption of the ANC,
so I am without illusions.]

The greatest challenge facing advanced capitalism is the
progressive substitution of mechanical or robotic production for human
production, and the creation thereby of a larger and larger segment of the
population whose labor is not required by capitalism. That, I believe, is a challenge that
socialism is uniquely prepared to face.
Properly managed, it can mean the steady diminution in necessary
unpleasant labor and its distribution across the entire population, rather than
its concentration in one disadvantaged segment of the population.

Well, the eclipse approaches. I shall be curious to see how the birds
respond.

Something called ALEXA measures the standing of each blog site, according to its hits, I guess. The Huffington Post ranks 273rd. This blog, you will be excited to learn, is ranked 4,909,739! So be careful what you say. The world is watching.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

So many important questions have been raised in the comments
of the past several days that I find myself somewhat overwhelmed. Rather than even try at this moment to
respond to all of them, let me offer a modest suggestion that has been lodged
in the back of my mind for some time now, concerning how to respond on a college
campus when a Nazi sympathizer or White Supremecist comes to speak. The response I propose would require
self-discipline and coordination, perhaps beyond what students are capable of,
but it would be very interesting to observe its effect.

Suppose, to take an extreme example, that David Duke is invited
to speak at Duke [a local university in the next town over from where I
live]. There should be not a word of
objection or condemnation from anyone on campus. When he arrives, those opposed to him should
pour out and take every available seat in the venue. If necessary, they should line up days in advance,
trying to freeze out any KKK supporters, including those who invited him. Once in the auditorium, the opposition should
sit quietly and neither by word or action evince the slightest response to what
Duke says. There should be no signs, no
placards, no chants, no laughter, no booing.
Just dead silence. Regardless of
what Duke says, the audience should remain inert. When the speaker is done, everyone should get
up silently and walk out, leaving a palpable hole in the air, a nothingness.

Trust me. As one who
has given hundreds of public speeches over a long life, I can testify that this
would be unnerving. As a public
demonstration it would be far more effective than a noisy confrontation fit for
television. It would be a
non-event. If some Duke supporters get
into the event, let them shout their lungs out while all around them is dead
silence. If they are denied the validation
of opposition, after a while they will start to feel foolish.

As I say, this would take discipline and coordination. But it would be vastly more powerful than
interfering with Duke’s freedom of speech.
Let us recall that the right to speak does not carry with it a right to
be paid attention to, to be taken seriously [this too I can attest as a
one-time public speaker!]

This is just a thought, but it would be interesting to see
it play out.

Friday, August 18, 2017

Some natural law must be operating here of which I am
unaware. On many occasions I have
written and posted lengthy discussions running to several thousands of words
which have occasioned at most a languid comment or two. Two days ago I posted thirty-three words with
an embedded link, thereby provoking one of the longest and most interesting
threads of comment in the history of this blog.
Perhaps if I just posted “So?” the comments space would overflow.

Out of the wealth of ideas finding expression in those
comments, let me single out just one, the free
marketplace of ideas, for some discussion. The metaphor of a free market of ideas raises
all manner of problems, and it might be fun to explore some of them for a
bit. The notion underlying the metaphor
is of course that in a real marketplace, where goods and services are offered
for sale, consumers, who are presumed to be excellent judges of their own
pleasures and pains, very quickly learn which commodities yield a pleasure
commensurate with their price and which do not.
Consumers’ unconstrained purchasing choices, which when aggregated with
the choices of others constitute some level of effective demand, determine the
prices at which the commodities sell, and hence the profits made by their
producers. Commodities sought by
consumers establish themselves in the market; those shunned are unprofitable
and are soon withdrawn.

By analogy, we are asked to believe, opinions compete for
acceptance in the way that goods and services compete for buyers. Hence the familiar expression, “I’ll buy
that,” meaning “I will accept that as true.”
Good ideas compete with bad ideas, with the good ideas gaining wider and
wider acceptance as the bad ideas, like Betamax, are driven from the
intellectual marketplace.

There are so many things wrong with this analogy that it is
truly difficult to understand why it has gained such currency [itself an
interesting metaphor, by the way.] Consideration
of a proposition is nothing like consumption of a commodity, and the conclusion
that the proposition is true is nothing like the experience that the commodity
yields pleasure [although a deep exploration of the psychological links between
the oral incorporation of food and the intellectual acceptance of an idea might
actually be interesting.]

Let me focus on just one problem. In the modern world, consumers are presented
with a completely unmanageable multiplicity of commodities whose safety,
purity, and reliability it is beyond their ability to assess. No one [save Rand Paul perhaps] seriously claims
that the invisible hand of the free market can be relied on quickly, and with
acceptable safety, to weed out faulty or poisonous products by the unfettered workings
of competition. Hence we rely on the
Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, to maintain product safety and purity
standards enforceable by law.

If one takes the metaphor of the free marketplace of ideas
seriously, the clear implication is that the government ought to institute a
Facts and Theories Administration, or FTA, whose responsibility it would be to
regulate the dissemination of ideas, enforcing standards of evidentiary
solidity and conceptual purity to protect us from dangerous ideas that are
potentially fatal to our intellectual well-being.

Hmm. That is not
exactly what the folks have in mind who push the notion of the free market of
ideas.

I am an absolutist when it comes to freedom of expression,
because long experience has taught me that in this society, it is more than
likely going to be my ideas that are squelched, my voice silenced, when limits
are placed on what can be said in the public sphere. But what would I say in the socialist society
of my dreams? Ah well, that is a post
for another day.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Those of you who followed the link in my previous post to the chilling VICE video featuring an interview with Charlottesville protest organizer Christopher Cantwell really have to watch this. I am speechless.

Despite their seeming unimportance in the larger scheme of things, the events in Charlottesville may well prove a seminal moment in recent American public life, for at least three reasons. First, Trump’s clearly expressed sympathy with the neo-Nazi demonstrators is an indelible stain on his presidency that may have significant consequences. Second, the decision of the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan sympathizers to go unmasked, lit by their own torches, and eager to be interviewed on television personalizes them and makes it increasingly difficult for apologists and temporizers to claim, as Trump did, that there were “many good people” in their ranks. Third, the neo-Nazis were openly and vocally anti-Jewish, not merely anti-Black, and that rather old-fashioned obsession puts a number of people in Trump’s administration, including his son-in-law and daughter, in a rather difficult position, to put it as delicately as I can.

A news outlet called Vice produced a more than 20 minute report on the affair, including a brilliant interview with one of its organizers, Christopher Cantwell. I understand that there is ferocious competition for your attention, but I strongly urge you to watch this lengthy report. Don’t miss Cantwell’s little
exchange with the interviewer at roughly 3:40 – 4:00. You can be sure that Jared and Ivanka have seen
that. I would love to be a fly on the
wall when Ivanka asks her daddy whether this is one of the good people there to
protest the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee.

There is a great deal to be said about the so called
alt-right, its emergence into the sunlight, its integration into the Republican
Party, the cowardly timidity of Republicans in continuing to support Trump, and
the question whether this will provoke defections from the White House
staff. Others with bigger megaphones
than mine have been shouting about this for six days now. I should like to make just one point that has
not, so far as I know, been a part of the commentary.

The alt-right, it is said over and over again, is fueled by
hatred and anger. What struck me most
forcefully about the interview with Cantwell was that he did not seem consumed
with anger. He seemed cheerful, happy,
pleased with himself and with how the protest unfolded. He was having a very good time. I was reminded of the films I have seen of
the Hitlerjugend, their eyes glowing,
their faces lit with happiness. To be
sure, they had hatred in their hearts, but it was, if I may put it this way, a
cheerful hatred, an intense pleasure at expressing openly, in accord with their
fellows, their contempt for inferior humans, for Jews, homosexuals, gypsies,
communists, foreigners – for anyone not blond and blue-eyed [like Hitler or
Goering or Goebbels, hem hem.]

The mostly young men marching in Charlottesville with Nazi paraphernalia
were clearly on a high, exultant, happy, pleased with themselves and with what
they were doing.

Monday, August 14, 2017

My post on the Charlottesville event has elicited two
comments, both of which, in different ways, are I believe misguided. Here are the two comments:

Frank said... Professor Wolff, Does your critique extend to white racists who are not within any positions of
power (social, economic, or political)? If so, I'm wondering how one could
square the view of white supremacy for the power it provides white people with
the fact that many of the people holding up Nazi symbols and whatnot in
Charlottesville likely do not hold any position of power or privilege in this
society.

Anonymous said...

"The Africans were not seized, brought to the Americas
and enslaved because they were thought to be inferior. Quite to the contrary,
they were enslaved because they were thought to be good workers, and hence well
worth their price and the cost of their upkeep." What an odd assertion. To be sure, the motivation to enslave
was not black inferiority, any more than a farmer's motivation to employ a mule
is the inferiority of the beast. But the status of the mule as beast is the
cause of its employment by the farmer, just as the perception of blacks as
something inferior was the cause of their enslavement. Blacks were enslaved
because they were thought to be inferior (your strange "quite to the
contrary" notwithstanding).

To Frank, I respond:
You are mistaken. All of the
people “holding up Nazi symbols and whatnot in Charlottesville” hold a position
of power and privilege in this society, one that is, I would imagine,
desperately important to them, and which they feel is threatened. What position of power and privilege? They are White. That fact by itself, regardless of their
education, wealth, or position in the economy, confers on them in America a
position superior to that of Black people.
You think not? When was the last
time a White father had to have “the talk” with his White son? It is precisely their lack of status and
position and wealth in White society that makes it so desperately important to
them to be superior to any Black man [or woman – that raises other issues as
well] in America.

To Anonymous: You are
simply wrong. The West Africans sold
into slavery were not selected to be sold by the local Black bigwigs because
they were perceived as inferior. They
were captives in local wars or were otherwise vulnerable. Some were in fact local nobles who had been
captured. Hence such names as “Prince”
given to male slaves by the American owners.
The American slave owners tried to enslave Native Americans but for
various reasons that did not work well.
They also did their best to enslave indentured English servants, but there
was sufficient protection by the English Common Law to make that
unfeasible. The White characterization
of the slaves as inferior was an ex post
rationalization, not an ex ante
reason for or cause of their enslavement.

The events next door in Virginia have brought a certain
amount of clarity to the issue of race in America. It might be useful to remind ourselves of
some facts that, although well known, are often forgotten. Africans were brought to this continent
against their will for one reason, and one reason alone: to serve as a controllable source of labor
for Europeans seeking their fortune in the New World. The legal institution of chattel slavery
developed slowly during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. New World slavery was unlike traditional European
and Asian slavery first in being hereditary, and then, over time, in being
racial in its definition. The Africans
were not seized, brought to the Americas and enslaved because they were thought
to be inferior. Quite to the contrary,
they were enslaved because they were thought to be good workers, and hence well
worth their price and the cost of their upkeep.

The slave owners did not hate their slaves, any more than
they hated their mules or horses.
Because some of the slaves were used as servants – cooks, nurses,
nannies, footmen, hairdressers, and handmaidens – the slave owners lived in
very close proximity to at least some of their slaves, and on occasion they
developed a fondness for them. The male
slave owners were often sexually attracted to their female slaves and forced
themselves on them, thereby cheaply increasing the size of their slave
holdings.

The slave owners drove their slaves mercilessly in the
fields and beat them cruelly at will for the slightest disobedience, but they
were by and large extremely careful not to kill them or maim them in ways that
interfered with their work, because the slaves were expensive pieces of
property, and a man would no more hang his slave on a tree by the neck than he
would kill a recalcitrant mule.

All of this changed once the slaves were freed. The slave owners could be easy and intimate
with their slaves because there was a legally enforced absolute divide between
the legal status of a white man and the legal status of a slave. After liberation, the Whites were perpetually
terrified of “uppity negroes,” of the divide being bridged, of Black men and
women behaving as though they were the equals of White men and women. What we now call segregation was the
result: separation of Whites and Blacks and
domination of Blacks by Whites, maintained by law, by custom, and by force.

North America was a White Supremacist society from the early
seventeenth century until the founding of the United States in the late eighteenth
century. The United States was then a de jure White Supremicist state – what
is in other contexts called a White Settler state – for the first three
quarters of a century of its existence, and then a de facto White Supremicist state for at least an additional century
or so. White Supremacy has been formally
illegal and socially in question for only the past fifty years or so.

Hatred has fundamentally very little to do with White
Supremacy. White Supremacy is a policy
of domination and economic superiority of Whites in a multi-racial society. African-Americans are not worried about
whether White people want to be friends.
Most of the African-Americans I know have quite enough friends, thank
you very much. African-Americans demand
legal, economic, and political equality.
And that terrifies many Whites, who do not want to give up the superior
legal, political, and economic position in American society that they acquired
through being born White.

For all of these reasons, the Charlottesville events have
been usefully clarifying. It is not at
all surprising that there is a very large and enthusiastic audience for Trump’s
racism. Anyone familiar with the history
of this society both before and after the founding of the United States would
expect as much.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

There has been a good deal of chatter online lately about
the future prospects of the Democratic Party, focusing principally on the
growing conflict between progressive and centrist groups and tendencies. Not at all surprisingly, the Clinton forces,
heirs to the Democratic leadership Council, have been badmouthing the Bernie
supporters, who in turn have been dissing the Clintonite Establishment. A cottage industry of Kamala Harris
supporters has sprung up, hearts beat faster whenever Elizabeth Warren
surfaces, Joe Biden has dipped his aging toe in the water, and meanwhile an
astonishing increase in the number of local Democrats interested in public
service has hopes for 2018 rising. All of
this is just what any observer of American politics would predict.

I would like to offer my amateur opinion about all of this,
taking care to make clear that I am no sort of expert on the subject at all. I have never run for any public office more
exalted than School Committee [ran third in a three way race for two seats,
lost on a recount by twelve votes], I have never worked for any political
campaign beyond knocking on doors and entering data, and the closest I have
ever come to big league politics was attending a lunch in Shutesbury, MA with a
small circle of equally inexperienced lefties to discuss with Sam Bowles his
chances for running for the 1st Congressional District when Silvio
Conte retired [Sam decided against it, and the seat was won by John Olver, who
held it for many years until he was redistricted.] With those caveats, let me plunge in.

First, I think we should focus on 2018 and leave 2020 to the
professionals and the wannabes for the time being. The political situation is extremely unsettled,
it is at this point an open question whether Trump will serve out his term, and
the 2018 off year elections offer very exciting chances for those of us on the
left. For reasons I will lay out, I
think this is an ideal time for an extremely forceful left-wing political push,
even though I think the somewhat longer term prospects for left politics are questionable
if not dim. Let me explain.

Off year elections are determined by turnout. Only a third of eligible voters actually
bother to go to the polls in the off years.
Hence, voter enthusiasm is all.
Two things have given the left an enormous advantage in the competition
for off year turnout. The first, of
course, is Trump himself whose appeal beyond a small base is dwindling, and who
inspires loathing across a wide swath of the remainder of the electorate. The second factor is health care. Never mind the facts, the history, the
details. The American people have gotten
it into their heads that the Republicans want to take away their health care. Without giving the matter very much serious
thought, they have come round to the conviction that health care is a natural human
right. Lefties have been saying that
forever, alienating the chattering classes, appearing uncontrollably radical,
losing elections. All of a sudden, it
seems that everyone agrees.

MEDICARE FOR ALL. That is a platform we can run on in 2018, it
is a platform we can win on. Never mind
that there is not the slightest chance in the world of anything remotely like
that being enacted. A tidal wave of
Democratic wins in 2018 would produce a usable majority in the House and a
miniscule majority in the Senate.
Radical health care reform might pass a Democratically controlled House
but it could never win fifty-one votes in the Senate, let along 60 votes to
break a filibuster. It doesn’t
matter. An anti-Trump pro-Health Care
platform in 2018 could dramatically alter the political complexion of Congress.

If we actually took back the House and even the Senate, would
it be enough? I am reminded of the wise
words spoken by a sobered up Paul Newman to a young, inexperienced Robert
Redford in The Sting. Redford wants Newman to teach him the Big Con
so that he can get back at gangster Robert Shaw, who had Redford’s buddy Luther
killed. Newman agrees, but cautions him: When it is all done, even if you take Shaw
down, it won’t be enough, but it is all you are going to get, so you have to be
willing to take it and walk away.

This is our moment on the left. With Trump as the enemy and health care as
the issue, we can win big. Even if we
do, it will not be enough, but it is what there is, and we will have to be willing
to take it.

The polite, mannerly, country club racism of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is at base indistinguishable from the Alt-Right White Supremicist Neo-Nazism on display in Charlottesville, VA yesterday, save that the perpetrators of the Charlottesville violence run the risk of being arrested, whereas Sessions is the Attorney-General of the United States. Let me say that again. Sessions is the Attorney-General of the United States. This is an appalling country.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Those among you who live in the United States have probably
seen reports of the confrontation in Charlottesville, VA between white
supremicists and members of the Ku Klux Klan on one side and protesters against
them on the other. There has been a good
deal of commentary to the effect that Trump’s presidency is empowering and
legitimating the racists, and of course that is true. But it is useful to remember that the
American colonies were built on slave labor [as well as other forms of unfree
labor] and lying at the heart of the United States is structural racism that
persists to the present day. Indeed, one
of the reasons why America, alone among advanced capitalist nations, has never
had a strong, successful socialist movement [my grandfather’s efforts to the
contrary notwithstanding] is that after the slaves were freed, and four million
men and women well prepared for industrial, agricultural, and craft labor entered
the free labor market, white labor unions struck a devil’s bargain with
employers accepting lower wages in return for an exclusion of the Black workers
from the workplace. Even such low wage
jobs as department store sales clerk were for a long time closed to Black women,
and the reason why Black Pullman Sleeping Car porters were often leaders in the
Black community is that those service jobs were the best available to Black
men, and hence drew the smartest and ablest men from the Black population.

The election of a Black president aroused, and right-wing
media legitimated, already widespread deep seated racial prejudice. Progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders
need to embrace Black members of the working class, along with White workers
who are prepared or can be brought to make common cause with them. Identity politics is not in conflict with
class politics. In the United States,
they are inseparable.

This report is worth reading. The war fever being stoked by Trump is not matched by any change in U. S. military actions or preparations. Also, "Hey Man"'s observation is entirely correct. Supposedly sober types like General Mattis speak casually of the genocidal destruction of the entire population of North Korea as though it were simply a technical matter.Meanwhile, it appears Trump will offer Joe Manchin a cabinet job, allowing the newly declared Republican governor of West Virginia to appoint a Republican replacement, after which the Senate can pass their horrendous health care bill. This is monstrously bad news.

Friday, August 11, 2017

The lives of millions of South Koreans, North Koreans, Japanese, and Americans depend on the ruler of North Korea being more rational than the President of the United States. Can no one rid us of this narcissistic uncontrolled child?

Thursday, August 10, 2017

The down side of living in a retirement home [or CCRC, as we like to say] is that everyone is old. The up side is that everyone is old [and still alive.] Yesterday, while Susie and I were doing our bit on the communal 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle in the lobby of our building, a sprightly, pulled together lady walked up and introduced herself as a long time resident of the building. She allowed as how she is ninety-nine! I began to reevaluate my chances of living to see a turn to the left in American politics.

When Black people were dying of drug overdoses, it was a criminal justice problem, and the solution was to put in jail ever Black man the police could nail with a joint. Now that White people are dying of drug overdoses, it is a public health problem, and the solution is counseling and medical treatment.

The little dog followed me home again this morning, so after Susie and I once more drove him home, I decided it was time to act. Google tells me that the big gated house
[4992 sq. ft. !] is owned by a Duke hospital surgeon. I wrote the good doctor a letter explaining
that much as I enjoy my quality time with his dog, I cannot keep driving him
home, so unless he is confident that the dog can get home on his own [it is a
male – my mistake], I think he should take steps [the doctor, not the dog,
although Mike may be right that the dog has the upper hand in all of
this.] I shall be sorry to see him
go.

I was deeply saddened to read that F. Lee Bailey, the famous defense attorney, is nearly broke and working over a hair salon. Why do I care? you might ask. Because F. Lee Bailey was one of my classmates at Harvard in the early '50s. I never knew Bailey, of course. Nor did I know Ted Kennedy or John Updike, also my classmates. [I did actually know Wally Gilbert, who went on to win a Nobel Prize.] Bailey never graduated. He left after two years to join the Air Force [it was during the Korean War.] All of this was more than sixty-five years ago, and I could probably get away with claiming that I knew them all, but to quote Richard Nixon, "that would be wrong."

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

My remarks about North Korea prompted a number of
interesting comments. Let me address
just one relatively minor but important issue.
At the height of the cold war between Russia and America, there was a
very great deal of serious concern among the American military about the
possibility that a Russian nuclear attack would, in several different ways,
disrupt communications and the chain of command. What would happen, American military planners
asked, if Congress was “taken out” by a Soviet strike, making it impossible for
even a select committee of the Senate to sign off on the use of nuclear
weapons? Mightn’t a Soviet attack disrupt
communications between the President and the Joint Chiefs, or between the
central military high command and the Commanders of nuclear submarines on
patrol under the waters of the Atlantic or Pacific? Would it prove impossible for the soldiers
stationed in hardened ICBM silos in the Dakotas to double check a command to
fire their missiles? Would it be unfeasible
to reprogram missiles to new targets after an attack?

These and many other questions were debated in think tanks,
but the answers were hardly academic.
Software and hardware had to
be designed to implement whatever strategic response the President and top
military planners decided in advance
in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.

In the end, certainty was given priority over flexibility,
and systems were designed and put in place to ensure: first, that only the
President had the authority and capability to order the use of nuclear weapons;
and second, that once a Presidential order was issued it would be conveyed
without intermediation or delay to the military personnel charged with carrying
it out.

As a consequence, if Trump were to order a nuclear strike,
there would be no period of debate, delay, reconsideration, and double checking
before the order was carried out. Kelly,
McMaster, and Mattis would not be able to slow walk the order while Trump was
calmed down, flattered, reassured about the size of his hands, and propped up
in front of an ego-confirming crowd of supporters. We could of course hope that if Trump
demanded the nuclear codes, someone would offer him a dud phone into which he
could shout orders like a crazy street person yelling into an unconnected
handset in a street corner booth. We
could hope, but nothing in the system in existence offers much reason for confidence.

One other matter of great importance about which I will say
only a word or two. As part of an
interesting exchange in the comments section, LFC writes: “The definition of 'existential threat,' as
with the definition of any threat, should take into account what can reasonably
be known with a high degree of confidence about intentions, not simply
capabilities. Thus, for example, far from the UK and France posing an
existential threat to every country in the world as the post says, the UK and
France do not pose an existential threat to any country since there is no
evidence at all that the UK and French governments, or really any conceivable
UK and French govts, intend a first use of their nuclear weapons. (Indeed I'd
guess that UK and French nuclear doctrines explicitly renounce or abjure first
use, though I'd have to check on that.)

To say that every nuclear armed country by definition poses an existential
threat to every other country is like saying that anyone who chooses to carry a
gun in a place where that is legal poses an existential threat to everyone who
does not carry a gun. That's not the case; it depends on the intentions, and
the mental condition, of the gun carrier.”

I am afraid in my haste I did not make myself clear. The term “existential threat” was meant to
convey not the likelihood of the threat being actualized but the magnitude of
the threat and the impossibility of defending against it. Of course one must use what information one
has when estimating the likelihood of a threat being actualized. The point is that a single madman in a
President’s chair can, in a world of conventional weapons, start a world war,
which is terrible indeed. But a single
madman in the President’s chair of a nuclear armed nation can start a
civilization ending war, which is to say that such a person poses an existential threat. Do France and Great Britain have mad
rulers? No. Could they?
Well, America does.

I need to say more about the North Korean crisis, not
because I know any more, but simply because it is far and away the most serious
threat now confronting the world. Let me
repeat what I said yesterday. Every
nation armed with deliverable nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to
every other nation in the world, because nuclear weapons cannot be defended
against. I wrote and spoke and argued
and protested about this almost sixty years ago as a young man, and nothing has
changed. Russia poses an existential
threat to every nation in the world. The
United States poses an existential threat to every nation in the world. China, Great Britain, France and Israel pose
existential threats to every nation in the world. Pakistan and India pose regional threats [I
do not know whether they possess intercontinental ballistic missiles or long
range bombers or nuclear submarines].
When North Korea succeeds in weaponizing usable long range missiles, it too
will pose an existential threat to every nation in the world.

Nuclear weapons cannot be defended against. The only thing any nation can do is to try to
deter nuclear armed nations from attacking it.
Any nuclear armed nation whose
government and military forces fall into the hands of a suicidal or irrational,
hence undeterrable, ruler can at any moment launch a nuclear attack even if the
cost is that ruler’s own destruction.

For reasons that I shan’t trouble you with now, the command
and control structure of America’s nuclear forces is deliberately and
intentionally designed to make it very difficult to delay or countermand a
presidential order to launch a nuclear attack.

It is within the realm of possibility that Donald Trump,
obsessed with negative press coverage and ill-tempered because rain is
interrupting his golf, could from his vacation retreat issue an order to attack
North Korea with nuclear weapons. If he
does that, it is extremely unlikely that the trio of generals around him will
intercede to reverse or simply “mislay” that order.

It is my armchair guess that Donald Trump does not care at
all about the lives that such an attack would cost, American lives as well as
North Korean, South Korean, and Japanese lives.
My guess is that he cares about nothing save whether he looks big and
important and powerful on television, in social media, and in the tabloid
press. This is the second biggest crisis
since World War II [the biggest was the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought to us by
young, handsome, well-educated charismatic John Fitzgerald Kennedy.]

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

We are at a very dangerous moment in the world. Let me be clear. It would be better if North Korea did not
have nuclear weapons. It would also be
better if the United States, Russia, Pakistan, India, France, the United
Kingdom, China, Israel, and Iran did not have nuclear weapons. But they do [save for Iran, apparently], and
there is no reliable defense against nuclear weapons, which means that mutual
deterrence is our only hope for a world not devastated by them. There is nothing special about North
Korea. It is just one more nation, the seventh
by my count, that has chosen to invest money and effort in the old technology
of deliverable nuclear weapons.

What can we do about North Korea? The same thing we can do about Israel or
France or Russia, and the same thing they can do about us: we can make it clear that we do not challenge
North Korea’s existence, and will respond to a nuclear attack with a nuclear
response. This is called Mutual Assured
Destruction, appropriately referred to as MAD.

Is there any way to persuade North Korea to give up its
nuclear weapons? Inasmuch as I do not
speak or read Korean [although one of my books has been translated into that
language] and have never been, I believe, within a thousand miles of that
nation, I have not a clue, but I would guess not, since if they were to do so,
the United States might very well undertake to overthrow the ruling government.

At this moment, we are dependent on a trio of generals to
manage and control the impulsive narcissistic child in the White House. That summarizes pretty succinctly the
miserable state to which we have fallen.

My new morning walk takes me, after a series of little
streets in Carolina Meadows, out onto Whippoorwill Lane, a country road most of
which, after the Farrington Mill intersection, is a long secluded dead end The entire walk, to the end of Whippoorwill
and home again, is roughly 3.6 miles, a bit shorter than my old walk, but quite
pleasant nonetheless. Near the end of
Whippoorwill, I walk past a grand house [grand for this neighborhood] with a
pair of gated driveways, guarded by a large Great Dane who cannot, I trust, get
through the gates. The Great Dane has
siblings, a little calico cat and a small black cheerful dog of mixed ancestry
who once trotted across the street to say hello.

Yesterday, I walked earlier than usual, starting at about
5:15 a.m. When I passed the big house,
the little black dog came over again to say hello. I scratched her behind the ears, petted her,
and told her how lovely she is. Then I
continued on my way. The little black
dog followed along, wagging her tail. I
thought, “Well, she will stop after fifty feet and go back,” but she kept on
right to the end of Whippoorwill Lane.
Then she turned as I did and walked back with me to her house.

But she did not stop when we had reached her home. She kept right on trotting beside me. I tried telling her to go home, but she just
took this as more attention and wagged her tail even more vigorously. She followed me past the corn field, past the
riding stables, all the way to the intersection with Farrington Mill. By this time I was getting worried. Although she is well fed and obviously a house
dog, not a stray dog, she has no collar, no i.d. tag.

She followed me to the entrance to Carolina Meadows, she followed
me as I turned from street to street, she followed me into my building, she
followed me onto the elevator, she followed me off the elevator, and she
followed me right into my apartment, delighting and astonishing Susie. We gave her some water and took her back down
to our car, which she hopped into as though she had done it a hundred
times. Then we drove back to the gated house,
pushed her out of the car, and drove away very fast.

This morning it started to rain before I reached the gated
house and I turned back. The flesh is
weak, and tomorrow, if she follows me home again, I cannot be certain that I
will do the right thing and take her home.
I mean, they can’t be very nice to her if she is so ready to follow me
home, right?

Monday, August 7, 2017

David Auerbach’s amusing summary of
a sci-fi story published sixty-three years ago in Galaxy took me on a trip down memory lane. My second venture into print [the first was a
letter to the Harvard Crimson] was a
fervent defence of Aristotle, published in Galaxy’s
principal competition, Astounding Science
Fiction. As a boy, I was an avid reader of science fiction. In the 40’s and
50’s, the leading sci fi publications were two stubby little monthly magazines
with nubby pages called Astounding
Science Fiction and Galaxy Science
Fiction. All the big names appeared there, including L. Ron Hubbard, who
announced the birth of his new psychological therapy, Dianetics, in a pair of
what were at least supposedly non-fiction articles. (Trouble with the law for
practicing medicine without a license led Hubbard to transform Dianetics into
the religion of Scientology, protected by the First Amendment.) One of the
oddities of the sci fi world in those days was the popularity of something
called Non-Aristotelian logic. There was even a famous novel by the great sci
fi writer A.E. van Vogt, which, if memory serves, appeared originally as a
serial in a predecessor to Astounding
Science Fiction. All of this was connected in some mysterious manner with
the then fashionable theories of Count Alfred Korzybski, which went by the name
“General Semantics.”

By 1953, I was a serious student of
Mathematical Logic, and the casual slandering of Aristotle by those entranced
by many-valued logics and other arcana offended my deeply conservative soul.
The result was this letter to Astounding
Science Fiction.

To the Editor:

I am a student of Logic and
Philosophy at Harvard University. I have been reading and enjoying science
fiction for many years, now, and generally have no complaints or criticisms to
make. For some time, however, I have read with increasing annoyance the many
editorials, and the like, on so-called “Aristotelian Logic,” and the proposed
Null-A logics. Your editorial of April, ‘53, seems to provide as good an
opportunity as any to get a few simple facts straight, so that we can dispense
with this nonsense about non-Aristotelian logic.

Your editorial, in effect, says
that while all human action is governed by, and completely describable in the
framework of, an Aristotelian Logic, human thought is capable of “grays and
shadings and tones,” which it is even possible to communicate to other human
beings. You then go on to make the error, apparently indigenous to science
fiction, of asserting that these “grays and shadings” are characterised and
governed by a multivalued logic. I do not know just what the fascination of
multi-valued logics is to the modern scientist and science-fiction writer, but
their misuse and incorrect application is perhaps the most common modern error.
Since most of your stories are chemically, physically, and biologically correct
wherever possible, I think we ought to set the record straight for logic.

First let me say unequivocally that
not one of the conditions mentioned by you in this or any other article, nor
any of the conditions ever described or alluded to in your magazine or any
other magazine, can be characterised by anything but two-valued Aristotelian
Logic! Furthermore, probably 99% of the errors can be traced to one fundamental
misunderstanding of the nature and claims of two-valued logic.

Let us consider the old situation
of the three buckets of water, filled respectively with hot, lukewarm, and cold
water. Now, it is said, this is a situation in which we need three values to
describe the situation, for it is not a true-false, on-off, hot-cold set-up,
but a yes-maybe-no, hot-medium-cold one. That this point of view is subscribed
to by you can be seen from the passage in which you say of Aristotelian logic
that it “insisted that everything in the world was either pure white or pure
black,” and later, that “his every act must necessarily be on a yes-or-no
basis.”

In other words, you seem to think
that Aristotle was unaware of greys, or lukewarm water, or of indecision. You
also seem to think that he, and Aristotelian logicians, wish to restrict the
world to what in ordinary language are called “opposites.” Your view, however,
is the result of the most elementary misreading of Aristotle and the logicians.
In fact, it is so simple a mistake that I am afraid it will almost come as an
anti-climax. To state it as simply as possible, no one ever claimed that water
was either hot or cold. They either claimed that it was hot or not-hot. And by not-hot is meant anything
but hot, including lukewarm. Similarly, no one has ever claimed that things are
either black or white. They have claimed only that they are either black or
not-black, where not-black
may include any shade of grey, green, chartreuse or purple you like. It may
even include those things which are not any colour at all, like sounds or
tastes – there, incidentally, would have been a more convincing argument for
three-valued logics, although it would have been equally incorrect.

As for your shadings of human
thought, the same applies. Just as the existence of thousands of alternative
actions in a given situation does not change the fact that any given one of
them is either done or not-done, so too the existence of even a
continuous shade of feelings and states-of mind does not change the fact that
for any given one of them, a person either feels or not-feels it.

Perhaps one of the sources of your
error is the failure to notice that the values, truth and falsehood, are
applied by logicians to sentences,
not to situations. Thus, one may have a description sentence for each of a
thousand possible events, each one stating that that event has taken place, but
once those sentences have been composed, it is absolutely and unequivocally true
that each one is either true or false. The shading comes not in the “values”
but in the situations described by those sentences, and Aristotelian logic is
as alive to such facts of life as modern science fiction.

In short, the solution to the “problem”
stated at the end of your editorial is that it doesn’t exist. Our actions and
feelings are equally shaded, and equally characterisable completely within
old-fashioned Aristotelian Logic. As for why that fact is so, the best
answer I have seen to date can be found in Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,”
but that is another, and vastly more complicated, question – Robert Wolff.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.